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Organization-based agent-oriented programming: model, mechanisms, and language

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Abstract

An increasing number of social computational systems consist of a great amount of autonomous entities and operate in highly dynamic and unpredictable environments. To construct such systems needs to seek high-level abstraction to manage the complexity of the systems and novel mechanism to support their characteristics, i.e., dynamism and flexibility. Agent-oriented programming (AOP) is considered as a potential paradigm for developing such systems by exhibiting a number of characteristics, such as autonomy, flexibility, social ability, etc. However, current researches on AOP mainly focus on the construction of multi-agent system (MAS) with theory and language facilities inspired from artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed AI, seldom considering and integrating the proven principles and practices of programming and software engineering. Moreover, abstractions and mechanism based on AI are inadequate for developing dynamic and flexible MAS in open environment. This paper proposes a novel AOP approach, namely Oragent, for constructing and implementing dynamic and flexible systems. From a software engineering perspective, Oragent integrates organizational concepts and mechanism into AOP language, and support the dynamism and flexibility with explicit primitives. The proposed approach consists of a programming model and a corresponding programming language. This paper presents the syntax and formal operational semantics of Oragent language, and studies a case to demonstrate our approach.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Science and Technology Institute, Zhengzhou, 450000, China

    Cuiyun Hu & Zhi Zhu

  2. College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Xinjun Mao & Mengjun Li

  3. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Xinjun Mao

Authors
  1. Cuiyun Hu
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  2. Xinjun Mao
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  3. Mengjun Li
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  4. Zhi Zhu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cuiyun Hu.

Additional information

Cuiyun Hu received her BS in Computer Science and Technology from Central South University, Changsha, China, 2006, and her MS and PhD in Computer Science and Technology from National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China, 2008 and 2013, repectively. She now is a teacher in Information Science and Technology Institute, China and her major researching field is agent-oriented software engineering, information security, and virtualization.

Xinjun Mao received the BS in Computer Science and Technology from College of Information Engineering, Zhenzhou, China, 1992, the MS and PhD in Computer Science and Technology from National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China in 1995 and 1998 respectively. His current main research interests include software engineering, agent theory and technology, and self-adaptive and self-organizing systems. Prof. Mao is the membership of IEEE and ACM, editor board member of several international journals and PC member of more than 20 international conferences/ workshops. He has published two books and 100 papers in his interesting research area.

Mengjun Li received his BS, MS and PhD in System Engineering and Applied Mathematics in 1998, in Multimedia and Virtual Reality in 2001 and in Computer Science and Technology in 2005 from National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China, respectively. His major researching fields are formal method and technology, information security technology.

Zhi Zhu received his BS from Guilin Air Force Academy, Guiling, China, 2006, and his MS and PhD from National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China, 2008 and 2013, repectively. He now is a teacher in Information Science and Technology Institute, China and his major researching field is agent technology, modeling and simulation of information spread.

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Hu, C., Mao, X., Li, M. et al. Organization-based agent-oriented programming: model, mechanisms, and language. Front. Comput. Sci. 8, 33–51 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-013-2345-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-013-2345-6

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